Over the past few years systems and methods for facilitating home shopping have become more prevalent among persons with a high degree of constraint on their time. Various home shopping, or remote ordering, systems have been developed which allow customers the ability to order various items of merchandise directly from one or more merchants without the need to travel to a retail facility or spend their time at the store, grocery shopping for example.
Pertinent such types of home shopping, or remote ordering, systems, include television based home shopping networks, where certain merchandise items are placed on display for remote viewing by potential customers. If a customer desires to purchase any of the items being offered, the customer calls the network's telephone number and provides an operator with merchandise ordering and method of payment information. The purchase price is automatically deducted from a customer's credit card, for example, and the merchandise item so ordered is typically delivered through the mails in a few days' time.
While such systems provide a relatively low-price alternative to visiting a retail facility, such home shopping systems are unable to provide a customer with adequate information necessary to track or edit orders and are further unable to provide customers with a more timely method for choosing desired items. Items offered for sale over television based home shopping networks are offered in the sequence devised by the network producers. A customer must often wait for a considerable period of time before an item appears in which they have an interest.
During the same period, home shopping through the Internet has grown increasingly popular as more and more merchants offer goods and services through associated websites. Internet based home shopping systems are considerably more flexible and user-friendly than television based home shopping systems, since all of the items offered for sale are accessible to a potential customer. The customer need only make a selection from a compiled list of items in order to effect purchase. Once a customer selects a particular item, the item is placed in a "virtual shopping basket" which the customer is able to take with them as they traverse the "virtual store". Successive items selected for purchase are placed into the virtual shopping basket until a customer completes their shopping trip. Virtual shopping baskets may be examined at any time and their contents can be edited or deleted at the option of the customer.
When the customer has completed shopping and is ready to purchase their desired items, the virtual shopping basket serves as a user-interpretable list of desired goods and services and includes such identification metrics as an item name, manufacturer, product size and cost. Once the customer decides to effect the purchase transaction, the customer may print-out the contents of the virtual shopping basket in order to obtain a hard copy record of the transaction.
While Internet based home shopping systems allow a home shopping customer a great deal of flexibility, Internet based home shopping systems, particularly Internet based grocery shopping systems, suffer from various disadvantages, specifically with regard to pick-up and delivery options. For example, when a customer visits a grocery store and makes grocery purchases, they are able to evaluate the contents of their shopping cart and make subsequent grocery purchases that will not either overflow the cart or total-up to an unmanageable weight. A customer will adjust the scope of their shopping trip by visually inspecting the shopping cart and making purchase decisions accordingly.
In the case Internet grocery shopping, it is very difficult for a customer to determine the total weight and total volumetric capacity of the goods being placed into a "virtual shopping cart". Since the capacity of a virtual shopping cart is unlimited, a customer may well order an amount of merchandise which exceeds the customer's available space to store it.
This difficulty may be even better understood when one considers that many of the items being ordered have a particular environmental storage requirement, i.e., they must be frozen, refrigerated or be stored at room temperature. A customer must be able to judge whether the goods being ordered can fit into the available refrigerator space, freezer space, and the like.
Accordingly, there is a need for some means to provide Internet based home shopping customers with such adequate weights and measures information such that they may compile and/or edit their virtual shopping basket accordingly. In addition to providing such weights and measures information, an Internet based home shopping system should be able to categorize purchased items according to their environmental storage requirements such that a customer is able to prepare sufficient space for their receipt. By using this type of information, a grocery store can appropriately package and store ordered items in an appropriate environment while awaiting the customer's arrival for pick-up. If the grocery retailer also provides delivery service, the categorized items can be stored in an appropriate section of a delivery vehicle, i.e., freezer compartment, refrigerated section, and the like.